Traditionally, researchers assumed that infants understand very little about the physical world. With the advent of more sensitive methods, however, investigators have come to realize that even young infants possess expectations about physical events. What is the nature of these early expectations, and how do they develop over time? These questions have been at the core of Baillargeon's research program for the past 20 years. This application seeks to test and extend two accounts recently developed by Baillargeon and her collaborators: the first focuses on how infants use their current physical knowledge to reason about physical events and predict their outcomes (reasoning account); the other account examines how infants attain new knowledge about physical events (learning account). Each account makes several testable predictions that will be investigated in the next grant period. The proposed research builds on experiments conducted in the previous grant periods, and also introduces several new research directions. The proposed experiments will make use of two different methods, the violation-of-expectation (VOE) and the object-manipulation (OM) method. In all, 18 projects are planned, organized into seven, inter-related lines of research. These lines examine: (1) the formation and use of event categories; (2) the acquisition of variables in individual event categories; (3) early competencies in infants' reasoning about events from different categories; (4) cueing infants to reason about a new variable in an event category, through exposure to an event from a different category in which this variable has already been identified; (5) effects of event category knowledge on infants' ability to detect surreptitious changes in variable information; (6) teaching infants (in or out of the laboratory) a new variable in an event category, through exposure to appropriate events from the category; and finally (7) the formation and use of abstract object categories, namely, inert and self-moving objects. The proposed research will help us better understand how infants reason and learn about physical events, and as such will give us a conceptually richer and more detailed picture of this facet of cognitive development in infancy.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01HD021104-20
Application #
6884051
Study Section
Biobehavioral and Behavioral Processes 3 (BBBP)
Program Officer
Freund, Lisa S
Project Start
1985-12-01
Project End
2008-04-30
Budget Start
2005-05-01
Budget End
2006-04-30
Support Year
20
Fiscal Year
2005
Total Cost
$337,514
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
041544081
City
Champaign
State
IL
Country
United States
Zip Code
61820
Baillargeon, Renée; DeJong, Gerald F (2017) Explanation-based learning in infancy. Psychon Bull Rev 24:1511-1526
Setoh, Peipei; Scott, Rose M; Baillargeon, Renée (2016) Two-and-a-half-year-olds succeed at a traditional false-belief task with reduced processing demands. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113:13360-13365
Scott, Rose M; Richman, Joshua C; Baillargeon, Renée (2015) Infants understand deceptive intentions to implant false beliefs about identity: New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning. Cogn Psychol 82:32-56
Song, Hyun-Joo; Baillargeon, Renée; Fisher, Cynthia (2014) The development of infants' use of novel verbal information when reasoning about others' actions. PLoS One 9:e92387
Setoh, Peipei; Wu, Di; Baillargeon, Renee et al. (2013) Young infants have biological expectations about animals. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:15937-42
Yang, Daniel Y-J; Baillargeon, Renee (2013) Brief report: difficulty in understanding social acting (but not false beliefs) mediates the link between autistic traits and ingroup relationships. J Autism Dev Disord 43:2199-206
Scott, Rose M; Baillargeon, Renée (2013) Do infants really expect agents to act efficiently? A critical test of the rationality principle. Psychol Sci 24:466-74
Sloane, Stephanie; Baillargeon, Renee; Premack, David (2012) Do infants have a sense of fairness? Psychol Sci 23:196-204
Baillargeon, Renée; Stavans, Maayan; Wu, Di et al. (2012) Object Individuation and Physical Reasoning in Infancy: An Integrative Account. Lang Learn Dev 8:4-46
Scott, Rose M; He, Zijing; Baillargeon, Renee et al. (2012) False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks. Dev Sci 15:181-93

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